We all hear the stories about girls not watching their drinks and having someone slip them something or being dragged into a room of a frat house when they've had too much to drink and being assaulted by a big, scary college boy. Of course, we all try to be careful so this doesn't happen to us. We walk to the frats in big groups and butt into our friends' conversations with boys when it seems like they're leading somewhere that she doesn't want it to go, but we never think that anything is going to actually happen to us.
Until it does.
"It Happened Here" chronicles the journeys of a few college-aged girls from the time they are sexually assaulted, how they reacted, how their schools handled it, and how they recovered.
The most alarming commonality between each of the victims was that they were all friends, or at least acquaintances, with their attackers. According to the documentary, 85 percent of reported sexual assaults come from acquaintances. Eighty-five percent.That is a statistic high enough to almost throw the stereotype of being attacked in a dark alley by a random stranger lurking in the shadows completely out the window.
The documentary also reported that one in five women will be sexually assaulted during college. It also said the only 20 percent of sexual assault cases are actually reported.
"We like to believe it's false reporting because we just don't like to believe that rape happens at the rate that it does, but it does," Diane Rosefeld, lecturer on gender violence and Title IX at Harvard, said in the documentary.
The movie also focused on how horribly the colleges handled the reported rape cases that were presented to them. One student said that her school refused to let her switch dorms, even though she was forced to walk by her attacker every day. Others didn't walk in their college graduation because they didn't want to hear their attacker's name called out and remember that he made it through college without any repercussions for his actions.
"I was more hurt by Amherst than I ever was by him," one victim says of her college.
Why this documentary is so important is because something needs to change, but nothing has. Sexual assault on college campuses isn't something that's new. Colleges across the country have been sweeping this problem under the rug in order to attract more students (aka money) and not scare them off with a rape scandal. In the process of doing this, they've completely disregarded the needs of the victims.
"It Happened Here" makes this statement and presents a sexual assault on college campuses in a way that most people don't look at. And it makes one thing abundantly clear: something needs to be done.
